On lmde (at least since u4 rc), typically boot pauses for a few seconds on starting cups. This I found rather annoying, being that I am booting on SSD. This also seems a known issue upstream in Debian.

I did a quick hack to solve this annoyance. I enclosed most of the /etc/init.d/cups "start" code in a () & block, hence letting it fork off and finish starting while init continues to the dm. This worked great, and got me back to a ssd that boots quick again...